WHITE NOSTALGIA

A scene from the German show "Babylon Berlin"

by Jake Bowyer

One of the biggest hits of the summer in 2009 was an indie pop ditty about belle époque France. Entitled “1901,” this song, performed by the band Phoenix, is not about anything in particular. The one tell, if it can be called that, is contained in the lyrics:

“Past and present, 1855-1901
Watch them build up a material tower
Think it's not gonna stay anyway
Think it's overrated.” 

The tower in question is the Eiffel Tower—one of the visual trademarks of Paris. The trademark is now guarded by French Army soldiers and is ringed by barricades designed to prevent Islamic terror attacks. This is a far cry from the Paris celebrated in Phoenix’s biggest hit.

Thomas Mars, the lead singer of Phoenix, said quite clearly during the heyday of “1901” that the song was a fantasy piece about a Paris that was “better.” Such a sentiment may seem out-of-place coming from an indie rock band. After all, as Wagner Clemente Soto points out, indie rock is the musical equivalent of soy. “Soy boys,” those overly feminized, overly dramatic beta men, dominate the indie rock scene, and by all appearances, the members of Phoenix can be called “soy boys.” However, even these limp wrists have eyes, and anyone with eyes can clearly see that Paris is burning.

Back in 1901, Paris was the center of the cultured world. Nowadays it is a city literally covered in excrement. Once Paris boasted of poets, musicians, authors, and actors. Now it is home to the ultra-rich and jihadist gangsters who live in the crime-ridden suburbs. Paris was once a city that was majority white and majority French; it is now seventeen-percent black and can boast of a Muslim population that accounts for between ten and fifteen-percent of the total population. Maybe, at the sake of wearing the dreaded “R word” emblazoned on my chest, these facts are what make for melancholy ditties like “1901?”

Another, more recent example of very white, very urban nostalgia, can be found in the Netflix television series, Babylon Berlin. Based on the detective novel by German writer Volker Kutscher, Berlin Babylon is a stylish neo-noir set during the age of the Weimar Republic. The main protagonist is Cologne native Georeon Rath, a troubled World War I veteran who joins Berlin’s vice squad in order to save Dr. Konrad Adenauer, the future leader of West Germany, from being blackmailed by a gang of pornographers.

While the show is about municipal corruption and ultimately reveals the National Socialists to be the chief “bad guys,” Babylon Berlin gives right-leaning viewers much to chew on. For instance, in the first episode, Rath and the rest of the vice squad break-up a pornographic film that includes under aged boys dressed as angels and scenes of sacrilege. The film’s director, Koenig, defends his production by saying that the Weimar Constitution grants artistic licenses to creative endeavors. He sneers in Rath’s face and tells him that it will be difficult to convince a Weimar judge that he, a pornographer, is not an “artist.”

*************

In case you do not know, Weimar era Berlin was a den of absolute debauchery. Because of the terrible state of the German economy after World War I, German women resorted to prostitution by the thousands, and it was not uncommon to see cash-strapped German families sell their children into streetwalking. Berlin was the Bangkok of the 1920s, with sex tourists flooding in from points as far afield as Britain and Japan. Prostitution became so commonplace in Berlin that, according to author Mel Gordon, outdoor and indoor prostitutes were categorized by services offered, the condition of their bodies, and their geographical positions. Pregnant and under aged prostitutes could be acquired easily in Berlin so long as the john had enough foreign cash.

One of the leading exponents of Berliner decadence was sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld and his Berlin-based Institute for Sexual Science seriously studied previously taboo topics like masturbation, cross-dressing, homosexuality, and hermaphrodism. Unsurprisingly, when the Nazis came to power in 1933, one of their first targets for destruction was Hirschfeld’s institute.

Given the reality of Weimar Berlin, how could one long for its return? Berlin Babylon is hardly the small screen version of “1901,” as it does not present a glowing portrait of Jazz Age Europe. What the show does present is a time of relative innocence. For viewers in 2018, the decadence of Weimar Berlin seems relatively tame. Unlike today, when abnormal behavior has been normalized thanks to global capitalism, degeneracy was dangerous and alluring in 1929 Berlin. In truth, barring some extreme examples, today’s America is far more revolting, far more fallen than the Weimar Republic. A typical gay pride parade has more debauchery than any cocaine-fueled nightclub in old Berlin, plus the gender madness that Hirschfeld legitimized has now gone so far that it targets the unborn and the barely born. The type of things that made Berlin so scandolous can now be enjoyed with the simple click of a mouse.

From this vantage point, Berlin Babylon offers jaded twenty-first century viewers a chance to experience a time when collective innocence and morality was first deconstructed by hostile elites. And, like the Paris of “1901,” Berlin Babylon presents a predominately white metropolis where most foreigners are Russian Christians (although many of the show’s Russians also happen to be Communist revolutionaries). This is certainly not the case in modern Berlin, where the Muslim population accounts for 9.5% of the total population. This percentage is set to increase thanks to Angela Merkel’s insane immigration policies. By 2040, watching Berlin Babylon may be akin to watching a documentary about life in first century Rome.

What “1901” and Berlin Babylon show us is something so simple that only an intellectual could miss it: white Europeans miss the old days of white, mostly Christian cities. The Paris of 1901, which was the nerve center of a colonial empire, is preferable to post-colonial Paris, with its routine riots and its open hostility to all symbols of the French nation. The same holds true for Berlin. The major problem with such nostalgia is it misses the bigger picture, which is that liberalism, secularism, and “muh freedom” renders populations unprepared for hostile takeovers. Democracy is a poor defense against cultural Marxism and Third Worldism, and European and American elites have weaponized non-white grievances in order to perpetuate their anarcho-tyranny. Given that urbanites also never change their stripes, it would be foolhardy to expect them to defend their own cities.

Nostalgia is a useless emotion. The current nostalgia for the decadence of an older urban Europe is even more useless given the fact that the permissiveness of cities hold within their very marrow the seeds of their own destruction.